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The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
77–85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
First published in Great Britain by Penguin Group 1997
Copyright © Tracy Chevalier 1997
Chapter head motifs © Neil Gower
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014. Cover illustrations © Neil Gower
Tracy Chevalier asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007241460
Ebook Edition © 2014 ISBN: 9780007324347
Version: 2014-08-05
For Jonathan
As yellow is always accompanied with light, so it may be said that blue still brings a principle of darkness with it. This colour has a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye. As a hue it is powerful, but it is on the negative side, and in its highest purity is, as it were, a stimulating negation. Its appearance, then, is a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose.
Goethe, Theory of Colours
Translated by Charles Lock Eastlake
CONTENTS
She was called Isabelle, and when she was a small girl her hair changed colour in the time it takes a bird to call to its mate.
That summer the Duc de l’Aigle brought a statue of the Virgin and Child and a pot of paint back from Paris for the niche over the church door. A feast was held in the village the day the statue was installed. Isabelle sat at the bottom of a ladder watching Jean Tournier paint the niche a deep blue the colour of the clear evening sky. As he finished, the sun appeared from behind a wall of clouds and lit up the blue so brightly that Isabelle clasped her hands behind her neck and squeezed her elbows against her chest. When its rays reached her, they touched her hair with a halo of copper that remained even when the sun had gone. From that day she was called La Rousse after the Virgin Mary.
The nickname lost its affection when Monsieur Marcel arrived in the village a few years later, hands stained with tannin and words borrowed
